Alternative methods proposed to detect pesticides and antibiotics in water and natural food

- Research carried out by the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the UGR has developed new systems to achieve sensitive detection of pesticide and antibiotic residues in water, vegetables, milk and meat. The systems are based on techniques not much used nowadays

- Presence of antibiotics in foods of animal origin or fresh water can cause bacterial resistance or allergic reactions to the consuming population, as well as industrial problems in fermentation processes.

Spy Chief Seeks More Eavesdropping Power

Tuesday September 18, 2007 4:31 PM

By PAMELA HESS

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The top U.S. intelligence official is telling Congress it shouldn't succumb to pressure to roll back a new law that enhances the government's eavesdropping capability on terrorists as well as more traditional potential adversaries.

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, says China and Russia are aggressively spying on sensitive U.S. facilities, intelligence systems and development projects, and their efforts are approaching Cold War levels.

Wife Of Victim From Michael Moore’s Sicko Responds To Stossel Hit Piece

By: Logan Murphy on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 6:38 AM - PDT

ABC News, the same network that neo-cons use to further their agenda, decided to look at the question of Universal Health Care in the US. Who better to investigate it than John “The Free Market Trumps All” Stossel? As is evident from the promo from last Friday’s Good Morning America, Stossel’s program looks like little more than a way to demonize Michael Moore

U.S. home foreclosures soar in August

By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer
Tue Sep 18, 3:12 PM ET

The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month more than doubled versus August 2006 and jumped 36 percent from July, a trend that signals many homeowners are increasingly unable to make timely payments on their mortgages or sell their homes amid a national housing slump.

A total of 243,947 foreclosure filings were reported in August, up 115 percent from 113,300 in the same month a year ago, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday.

Rice apologises for US security firm shootings

· Move to prevent Iraq government expulsions
· Blackwater guards blamed for deaths of eight civilians

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Guardian

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, apologised to the Iraqi government yesterday in an attempt to prevent the expulsion of all employees of the security firm Blackwater USA.

The ministry of interior yesterday took the decision to expel Blackwater after eight Iraqi civilians were killed and 13 wounded in Baghdad when shots were fired from a US state department convoy on Sunday.

America's Addiction to Debt Finally Crashes the System

By John F. Ince, AlterNet
Posted on September 18, 2007, Printed on September 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62787/

We have to deal with the fundamental reality that Americans are addicted to debt. Debt today in the United States is at an all-time high in each of the three primary sectors: public, corporate and consumer debt. The national debt last week topped $9 trillion, up from approximately $5 trillion when George Bush took office.

To put this in perspective, the government of Bush & Co. has borrowed almost as much as the governments of all the other presidents of the United States combined. Consumer credit is now at scary levels almost: $2.5 trillion, and analysts are beginning to speculate that credit card debt could be the next bubble to burst. Corporate debt has reached astronomical levels through highly leveraged private equity deals, and no one knows just how how much froth is still in the system.

International team shows mercury concentrations in fish respond quickly to increased deposition

A joint Canadian-American research team have, for the first time, demonstrated that mercury concentrations in fish respond directly to changes in atmospheric deposition of the chemical. The international team's research began in 2001 at the Experimental Lakes in Northern Ontario and is featured in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tomdispatch Interview: James Carroll, American Fundamentalisms

American Exceptionalism Meets Team Jesus
A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll

He's a man who knows something about the dangers of mixing religious fervor, war, and the crusading spirit, a subject he dealt with eloquently in his book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. A former Catholic priest turned antiwar activist in the Vietnam era, James Carroll also wrote a moving memoir about his relationship to his father, the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll essentially grew up in that five-sided monument to American imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was "the largest playhouse in the world" and he can still remember sliding down its ramps in his stocking feet, as he's written in the introduction to his recent, magisterial history of that building and the institution it holds, House of War.

As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when George W. Bush referred briefly to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the country to warn against the consequences of launching a war against Afghanistan in response to those attacks -- now just another of the President's missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print. ("The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?") His stirring columns on the early years of our President's attempt to bring "freedom" to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful, moral voice from -- to use a very American phrase -- the (media) wilderness until much of our American world finally caught up with him.

‘Giving’ and Taking

Posted on Sep 17, 2007
By Chris Hedges

Bill Clinton has written a new book. It is called “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.” He will give a portion of the proceeds to charity. Giving, the former president informs us, gives us fulfilment in life and is “the fabric of our shared humanity.”

His book is the political equivalent of “Marley & Me” It is filled with a lot of vapid, feel-good stories about ordinary and wealthy Americans setting out to make the world a better place. It smacks of the philanthropy-as-publicity that characterized the largesse of the robber barons—the Mellons and the Rockefellers—and has become a pastime for our own oligarchic elite. Clinton’s call for charity is the equivalent of well-scrubbed prep school students spending a day in a soup kitchen, doling out food to the people whose jobs were outsourced by their mommies and daddies. It does little to alleviate suffering. But it is a balm to the conscience of the oligarchic class that profits handsomely from the impoverishment of the working class, globalization and our anti-democratic corporate state. The rich love to dine out on their own goodness.

Private Powell

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on September 15, 2007 - 1:25pm.

Here's a bizarre new interview with Colin Powell. He simultaneously warns against a "terror-industrial complex"—"an industry that only exists as long as you keep the terrorist threat pumped up"—and goes on to defend blithely defend the outsourcing of security and combat positions to Blackwater and other private contractors.

War profiteering goooood; just not too much.

Study Claims Pollution Causes 40% of Deaths

August 31, 2007 - 12:00am
By Megan Potter

A recent Cornell research project concluded that pollution deserves a place alongside heart disease and cancer on the list of leading causes of death worldwide. Contamination of water, air and soil leads to 40 percent of the planet’s death toll, according to a study conducted by Prof. David Pimentel, ecology and evolutionary Biology.

“In the United States alone, 76,000 people are in the hospital each year, with 5,000 deaths, just due to pollution of air, food or water. Cancers are increasing in the U.S., and AIDS is on the rise,” Pimentel said.

Paul Krugman: Sad Alan’s Lament

When President Bush first took office, it seemed unlikely that he would succeed in getting his proposed tax cuts enacted. The questionable nature of his installation in the White House seemed to leave him in a weak political position, while the Senate was evenly balanced between the parties. It was hard to see how a huge, controversial tax cut, which delivered most of its benefits to a wealthy elite, could get through Congress.

Then Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Senate Budget Committee.

Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead. The U.S. State Department said it plans to investigate what it calls a "terrible incident."

In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, an Iraqi official said.

Who’s the Boss?

Forget neocons and theocons. It’s the money-cons who really run Bush’s Republican Party.

By Kevin Drum

Missionary or mercenary? Put more plainly, what is George Bush at his core: a creature of the Christian right or a dutiful retainer of the millionaire’s boys club? Jon Chait, a senior editor at the New Republic, takes on this question in The Big Con, but only to dismiss it almost immediately. George Bush, he says, is an avatar of the modern Republican Party, and Chait has little doubt what today’s GOP really cares about:

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane ... The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda.

Why Health Care Is a Losing Issue for the GOP

September 12, 2007 | web only
Paul Waldman
The Republicans candidates' love affair with free-market fundamentalism has prevented them from addressing the health care crisis. The Democrats should take full advantage of that.

American Prospect Special Report on Amazonia

Tomorrow's Amazonia
ROGER D. STONE
An introduction to the Prospect special report on the how the earth's last great forests are being used an abused, and the ongoing effort to protect them.

Biodiversity in Jeopardy
MICHAEL GOULDING AND PAULO MOUTINHO
There are more life forms in Amazonia than anyplace else. But by the end of this century, there may be many fewer.

Deforestation and Poor Amazonians
MARY ALLEGRETTI
Brazil's forest dwellers, often its best stewards, are trying hard to make a living from the standing forest.

Orcinus: Albion's Seed I: The Puritans 1620-1640

--by Sara

Though earlier groups tried to settle the Chesapeake several decades earlier (and failed, for reasons we'll see in the next post), the first group of English settlers to make a go of it were the Puritans, who came from East Anglia to settle up New England between 1620 and 1640.

From East Anglia to New England
The Puritans were middle-class Calvinist mercantilists in the Dutch Reformed model -- not surprisingly, since East Anglia looks directly across the Channel onto the Netherlands, and many of the Puritans had family and business ties there. Though they'd been comfortably settled in the region for generations, that all changed between 1630 and 1641, the "eleven years' tyranny" when Charles I tried to rule England without a Parliament. This led to economic and social chaos across England, which worsened in East Anglia when the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to deal with the upheaval by stepping up persecution of the region's Puritan heretics. During those 11 years alone, over 80,000 Puritans pulled up stakes and moved on. One-quarter of these eventually landed in the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts, safely beyond the reach of the Anglican menace.

US Mortgage Crisis Goes International

by Steven D
Sun Sep 16th, 2007 at 12:40:29 PM EST

A run on a bank by its depositors? That's the sort of thing that hasn't happened since the Great Depression, right? Well, it's happening right now in the United Kingdom to a bank, Northern Rock, whose business is centered around mortgage lending:

People with accounts at the Northern Rock have withdrawn almost £2bn since Friday, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston has learned.

And the firm is bracing itself for more withdrawals in the coming days. [...]

Firedog Lake: The People of the Lie

By Phoenix Woman on Sat Sep 15, 2007 at 06:02 pm

These three stories have resonated with me lately:

– Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is now admitting — no, boasting — that he lied to Congress when he claimed a few weeks ago that the new Constitution-trashing FISA legislation helped thwart a terrorist plot.

– ABC correspondent Alexis Debat, much in demand in Beltway media circles as an expert on the Middle East, has been exposed as a fake who used lies (and bogus interviews-that-never-happened with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Kofi Annan) to do things such as promote the Bush White House’s planned attacks on Iran.

– The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen tries to pretend that major right-wing player and zampolit Ted Olson is just this innocent widdle bunny rabbit being picked on by those mean ole partisan donkeyheads: “Olson is the latest in an array of potential candidates, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who have drawn early objections from Democrats. The Washington Post reported last week that Olson had emerged as a leading contender, but many Democrats view him as a sharply partisan figure with alleged ties to a conservative magazine’s investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s.”

Glenn Greenwald: One-sided rules of political debate

Now that it is inescapably clear to everyone (rather than just bloggers) that we will remain in Iraq in full force through the end of the Bush presidency, and now that, according to a Fox News report this morning, "'everyone in town' is now participating in a broad discussion about the costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 months," what has attracted the righteous fury of Time's leading "liberal" pundit Joe Klein, who helped sell the Iraq invasion to the country in the first place?